A number of industrial processes involve the introduction of a loose solid organic feedstock into a pressurized reaction chamber or vessel. Unless the process is limited to batch operation this may require that the feedstock be pressurized and forced into the reaction vessel while the reaction vessel is maintained at elevated pressure, and possibly also at elevated temperature.
Earlier work in this field is shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,119,025 of Brown, issued Oct. 10, 1978; U.S. Pat. No. 4,947,743 of Brown et al., issued Aug. 14, 1990; and PCT Application PCT/CA99/00679 of Burke et al., published as WO 00/07806 published Feb. 17, 2000, the subject matter of all of these documents being incorporated herein by reference.
At the end of the process, the loose fibrous typically organic material leaves the reaction chamber through a discharge assembly of some kind, whence it is collected for further use or processing. To the extent that the process feedstock is then to be used as an input to a subsequent process, such as a biological digestion process, it may be desirable that the fibrous material be finely expanded.